Azernews.Az

By Sabina Idayatova

World-famous Azerbaijani scientist, professor of University of California Lotfi A. Zadeh has been awarded BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in the information and communication technologies (ICT) category.

The scientist received this award for the invention and development of fuzzy logic. This revolutionary breakthrough has enabled machines to work with imprecise concepts, in the same way humans do, and thus secure more efficient results more aligned with reality.

In the last fifty years, this methodology has generated over 50,000 patents in Japan and the U.S. alone.

Lotfi Zadeh's work has enabled us to communicate with machines through an increasingly natural, human language. Jury secretary, Ramon Lopez de Mantaras, says, "Rather than human beings having to take the time to learn the complex mathematical language of machines, fuzzy logic proposes a simpler language, so it is the machines that mimic human patterns of reasoning and behavior in order to solve problems."

Lotfi A. Zadeh was born in 1921 in Baku, capital of the former Soviet Republic of Azerbaijan, where his Iranian father was working as a journalist. Zadeh graduated as an electrical engineer from the University of Teheran in 1942. In 1943, he emigrated to the United States, where he took an MS in electrical engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Six years later, he earned his PhD in the same subject at Columbia University (New York), where he would teach for the next ten years. In 1959, he joined the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences in the University of California at Berkeley, where he has headed the Berkeley Initiative in Soft Computing since 1991.

He published his seminal work on fuzzy sets in 1965, and in 1968 proposed his theory of fuzzy logic. More than two decades later, in 1991, he introduced another new paradigm: soft computing, a hybrid methodology embracing fuzzy logic, neural networks, evolutive algorithms and probabilistic reasoning. Author of 245 papers, his research has been cited on more than 90,000 occasions, according to Google Scholar, and the vitality and influence of the field he created is evidenced by the number of papers - around 253,000 - that include the word "fuzzy" in their titles.

In the last 15 years, he has been concerned with the computational scenario where data and operations may be specified in a natural language, or what he calls "computing with words."

Zadeh has a long list of achievements. In 1993, Azarbaijan bestowed him an honorary Professorship from the Azerbaijan State Oil Academy. He was awarded the IEEE Medal of Honor in 1995 "For pioneering development of fuzzy logic and its many diverse applications", Outstanding Contribution Award of the Web Intelligence Consortium (Canada, 2003), Doctor Honoris Causa of the Muroran Institute of Technology (Japan, 2004), Doctor Honoris Causa of the Hong Kong Baptist University, (China, 2004), V. Kaufmann Prize and Gold Medal of the International Association for Fuzzy-Set Management and Economy (Spain, 2004), Nicolaus Copernicus Medal of the Polish Academy of Sciences, 2005, J. Keith Brimacombe IPMM Award in recognition of his development of fuzzy set theory and fuzzy logic (2005), Richard E. Bellman Control Heritage Award, Doctor Honoris Causa, Ryerson University (Canada, 2008).

The recent award of the scientist came from the Franklin Institute (Philadelphia, 2009)-- Benjamin Franklin Medal in Electrical Engineering for inventing and developing the field of "fuzzy logic," in which a system applies a quantitative assessment to inherently ambiguous ideas, thus providing a new paradigm to improve artificial intelligence and automated control systems.

Zadeh at the age of 91 still continues his research in the fuzzy logic field, in the hope to connect computers and systems more closely with natural language.